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Community Resource Mapping Project under way

Assistant Professor of Counseling Christina Stuive and students from her guidance class have partnered with the Community Action Coalition, People Promoting Wellness (formerly The MAPP Group of the Kenai Peninsula), United Way and KRC's Career and Community Engagement Center to develop a database of community resources available in the central Peninsula area.

According to Stuive, there is no comprehensive repository of community resources readily available to community members. Her class will be conducting a service-learning project to design and produce an all-inclusive resource guide to meet a demonstrated community need while benefiting the students in their learning process.

In the past decade, community resource mapping has been utilized in many communities throughout the country. The intent of the projects are to identify commonly thought of resources such as community centers and various non-profit agencies and also highlight non-traditional resources such as individuals, families and faith-based institutions.

The on-going project will seek to map underutilized resources such as clothing sources, food pantries, crisis housing sites, mental health and substance abuse counseling, tutoring, mentoring, after-school programs, leisure and recreation opportunities, childcare resources and any other ideas that the public might bring forward. Future guidance classes will maintain and update the database.

The students in Stuive's Guidance A150 class will be actively engaging with the community to collect data through site visits and face-to-face interviews. The more community involvement in the project, the more complete the resulting database will be. Anyone with information regarding resources that might be included in the mapping project is encouraged to contact Christina Stuive at 262-0335 or e-mail ifcjs@kpc.alaska.edu.

Semester by the Bay students experience whale necropsyWhen students signed up for the Kachemak Bay Campus Semester by the Bay program they might not have imaged taking part in the recovery of a rare whale carcass just a month and half into the semester. Dr. Debbie Boege-Tobin, assistant professor of biology at KPC's Kachemak Bay Campus, and her students were able to witness the necropsy (the equivalent of a human autopsy) of a rare Stejneger's beaked whale that was stranded and died Oct. 21 in Kachemak Bay.

The whale, sometimes known as the Bering Sea beaked whale or the Saber-toothed whale, was initially described by Leonhard Hess Stejneger in 1885 from a skull.

It wasn't until 1994 that the species was described from a fresh specimen.

The recovered carcass was donated to KBC and Tobin, her students and community volunteers buried it in horse manure on the beach to decompose.

Next year it will be retrieved and the skeleton will be articulated and displayed at the campus. Tobin is a lead volunteer with the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. She and her students are now working on the articulation of a gray whale skeleton after burying it last year.

Closing reception for Hidden Alaska: Bristol Bay and BeyondThere will be a closing reception for the Kenai Visitor and Cultural Center's exhibit, Hidden Alaska: Bristol Bay and Beyond at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 11. Dave Atcheson, the book's author and Kenai River Campus evening coordinator, will be doing a reading and presenting a slide show featuring photos from the book, taken by National Geographic photographer Michael Melford. Atcheson will also highlight recent and historical photos of those interviewed for development of the book.